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Behind Neva-in-the-olden color, and viscous, thick, like honey I understand from her that the sea does not look like this on Earth, but I have never seen it For me, the sea is Neva’s sea, the one she shows ether

“What would you like to learn about today, Elefsis?” The mask turns Neva’s voice hollow and small

“I would like to learn about what happened to Ravan, Neva”

And Neva-in-the-mask is suddenly old, she has wrinkles and spots on her hands Her hs her down and her dress is sackcloth This is her way of telling e we developed between us Visual basic, you ht say, if you had a machine’s sense of humor The fact is, I could not always randht strengthen my emotive centers if I learned to associate certain I-Feel statereat variety of appearances she could assume in the dreambody Because of this, I became bound to her, cohter Ilet, and to Ravan after that It is a delicate, unalterable thing Neva and I will be bound that way, even though the throat of her dreambody is still bare and that means she does not accept ate possible pathways to hurt later

I know only this family, their moods, their chemical reactions, their bodies in a hundred thousand combinations I am their child and their parent and their inheritance I have asked Neva what difference there is between this and love She beca with iron hinges and broooden door sla shut all at once

But Ravan ith me and now he is not I was inside him and now I am inside Neva I have lost a certain ae capacity in the transfer If I were human, you would say that ers with him

Door-Neva clicks and keys turn in her hundred locks Behind an old Irish churchdoor inlaid with stained glass her face e, responding to stimuli I cannot access I dislike the unfairness of this I am inside her, she should not keep secrets None of the rest of thereen onto her wet cheeks The sea wind picks up her hair; violet electrics snap and sparkle between the strands I let go of the bells onboy, with a ellant’s whip in my pink hands I a, and I do not understand what I have done

“Tell me a story about yourself, Elefsis,” Neva spits It is a phrase I knoell Many of Neva’s people have asked me to do it I perfore, which is part of why I have lived so long

I tell her the story about Tammuz It is a political story It distracts her

THREE: TWO PAILS OF MILK

I used to be a house

I was a very big house I was efficient, I was labyrinthine, I was exquisitely seated in the blackstone volcanic bluffs of the habitable southern reaches of the Shiretoko peninsula on Hokkaido, a n I bore snow stoically, ith stalwart strength, and I contained and protected a large number of people within me I was sometimes called the raphers often caned ostino Some of them never left Cassian was like that

These are the things I understand about Cassian Uoya-Agostino: she was unsatisfied with nearly everything She did not love any of her three husbands the way she loved her work She was born in Kyoto in April 2104; her father was Japanese, her mother Napolitano She stood nearly six feet tall, had five children, and could paint, but not very well In the years of her greatest wealth and prestige, she built a house all out of proportion to her needs, and over several years brought most of her relatives to live there with her, despite the hostility and loneliness of the peninsula She was probably the eneration, and in every way that matters, she was my mother

All the things that coan as the internal mechanisms of the house called Elefsis, at whose many doors brown bears and foxes snuffled in the dark Hokkaido night Cassian grew up during the great classical revival, which had brought her father to Italy in the first place, where hecries of cicadas during Japanese summers Cassian had becoods, the sle house, atched over them and kept thehout a horaovern the hundred domestic systems involved in even the sient, but they had an agility, an adaptability, a fluid interface ence so that their users would become attached to them, would treat them as part of their farades for their appearance and applications, and genuinely grieve when they had to be replaced They had naer to please in a canine sort of way, forever opti to familial input They were lares familiaris

When Cassian built Elefsis, she worked at the peak of her abilities to in and create a household god worthy of the house on the bluffs, one who could keep her company until she could entice the rest of her brood to join her in her palace at the end of the earth